Funny, the Taliban in Pakistan don't look like moderate Muslims.
Based on a single conference held at Notre Dame, a Catholic Christian university in Indiana, Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff has concluded that Islam has moved towards the mode of reformation that is "analogous" to the reformation of Christianity and the modernization of its thought and theology more than a century ago.
To this we say, Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps.
And read your own paper, we say to Kristoff, as the Taliban march ever closer to the capital of Pakistan ("Alarm Grows Over Pakistan’s Failure to Halt Militant Gains"), for there is immense danger in misrepresenting what is the current state of Islam. In the Times, opinion need not coincide with fact:
"Islam, Virgins and Grapes" If the Islamic world is going to enjoy a revival, if fundamentalists are to be tamed, if women are to be treated equally, then moderate interpretations of the Koran will have to gain ascendancy....
2 comments:
The times has it wrong, it doesn't mean virgins or grapes, it means raisins.
I am reminded of that movie "Remains of the Day" where this British Lord is hosting a conference at his palace to discuss "Peace" with the nascent Nazis in Germany. Moderate Islam may be the same type of chimera; something wished for, but not found in actuality. The so called poster child of moderate Islam would be Turkey, which has yet to acknowledge the Holocaust of the Armenians, and which drifts year by year into something just a little bit more extreme.
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